GERMAN media giant Bauer may be charting a course for a rebound from its rough year with a bid for London-based publisher Emap.

Hearst says it has pulled out of the running to acquire the media group, which includes British titles such as Heat and FHM.

As a result, Bauer – which publishes In Touch and the floundering Life & Style in the US – has been given additional time to negotiate an exclusive deal.

While Bauer has never folded a magazine, it has run into trouble over the past year.

Magazine wholesalers forced the company to increase the cover price of its celebrity magazines, which caused a drop in newsstand sales.

In September, it also had to scuttle plans to launch Cocktail Weekly, in part because wholesalers did not want to carry another low-priced magazine.

For that same reason, the American wing of the company was said to be a bit stymied with the hurdles they’ve faced launching a new title – and seemed to believe that the company was ratcheting down other launch efforts.

However, an acquisition of the British publisher could, in theory, allow for shared content which would certainly lower the cost of entry for any new US launches, if they opt to try one again.

Bonjour

Bonnier Media tossed a launch party earlier this week at the West Side hot spot Club Ultra to introduce a US version of Science Illustrated.

The magazine is the company’s flagship property and the largest-circulation magazine in all of Scandinavia.

Along with Men’s Health Living, from Rodale, it is one of the few launches by major publishers in the American market for the coming year. Rodale is classifying its launch as a test.

While Bonnier is officially calling its new entry a launch, it’s on a shoestring budget.

“I’d absolutely characterize it as a full blown launch” said Mark Jannot, the editor-in-chief of Popular Science and Science Illustrated.

He said the magazine is starting with what is a modest circulation of 100,000 with plans to raise it to 500,000 in five years.

“Our plan is to sink about $3 million into it before we turn a profit,” said Jannot, who is overseeing the launch.

It’s an extremely low launch price tag, as a way of comparison, Portfolio, the Condé Nast business magazine, is expected to cost over $100 million before it turns a profit.

The launch is being watched very closely by Jonas Bonnier, the scion of the family-run media giant. He didn’t make the party at Club Ultra, but he did send a huge bouquet of flowers.

In Scandinavia, Science Illustrated sells for $12 a copy on newsstands. The American version will cost $4.99. It is slated to hit newsstands on Dec. 18.

Costs are being held down because the content is basically being repackaged from the Danish edition and tailored for the American market.

“Science content is internationally neutral,” said Jannot. The US launch issue will carry stories on the science of snake venom, how to make a bionic eye, tracking giant icebergs and a space mission to Jupiter.

Last find

The last general-interest science magazine to launch in the US was Discover – and it’s currently finding employees heading for the door.

The magazine was started by Time Inc. in 1980 and went through a string of owners, including Robert Riordan‘s Family Media which went bankrupt in the late 1980s.

Then Bob Guccione Jr. who had teamed up with Sandler Media to buy the magazine from Walt Disney for about $20 million.

In that move, Sandler was apparently unhappy with the results and clashed with Guccione on the direction of the company.

That resulted in a shake-up in which Guccione moved upstairs with the title of chairman and Henry Donahue, a former Primedia executive, moved from CFO to CEO.

In the past month, a number of editorial people have suddenly discovered the door, including Susan Kruglinski, Michelle Kogan and Jane Bosveld.

On the business side, Marketing Director Lauren Evans recently left for Wenner Media.

Sources say morale has sagged. Not surprisingly, Donahue refutes that and insists turnover has been minimal.

“Kruglinski and Bosveld moved from senior editors to contributing editors, so they’re still with us and actively contributing,” Donahue said.

“Susan especially has a number of pieces in the Year In Science issue that’s just out now.

“On the editorial side, [Editorial Director] Patti [Adcroft] and I have been working to expand and upgrade the staff, the goal being to put out a more consistently excellent product versus some of the newsstand ups and downs we’ve had this year.

“We’ve created new positions like Deputy Editor (Bob Keating) and Research Editor (Missy Adams) to help accelerate that process.”

No I in . . .

The Nov. 26 issue of Forbes ran with several different covers, and apparently all that extra effort was pretty tough on the copy editors. America is misspelled on one of the editions, which features three Chrysler executives: Robert Nardelli, Tom Lasorda and James Press, on the cover.

The Forbes way of spelling “America” is thus: AMERCA. One of the alternate cover features is on the National Hockey League’s Toronto Maple Leafs, and apparently every word on that cover was spelled correctly.

The mistake was apparently taken out of the archived covers for Forbes on the Web.

A company spokeswoman was puzzled by the typo and had not returned a call by presstime to say how many copies of the typo had circulated.

We ‘Heard’

Fortune just lost Peter Eavis, who only just joined the magazine from Thestreet.com in late summer. He’s jumping to The Wall Street Journal, where sources say he is expected to take over the Heard on the Street column.

He had done much of his work on the fortune.com Web site. “We’re very sorry to see him go,” said a For tune spokeswoman. keith.kelly@nypost.com